Being Cool: The 4-Step Program

All you need to know about standing out as the coolest cat on the block.

If you thumb through the pages of any men’s magazine, there will be an interview with a scantily-clad woman in which she will detail the qualities she finds most attractive in a man. If you were to take her words as verbatim you’d come away with the impression that Seth Rogen is the sexiest man alive; “I love a nice guy”, “there is no bigger turn-on than a man with a good sense of humor” and “a toned body isn’t everything” are among the lies these models frequently use to let us normal fella’s believe that we could one day bag ourselves a supermodel.

The most overused (and the most misleading) is their insistence that we should just be ourselves, which sounds like a friendly piece of inspirational advice until you take into account the fact that it would be incredibly difficult for a paedophile to incorporate it into his dating strategy. Unless you’re Robert Downey Jr., ‘being yourself’ isn’t going to win you over any new fans; as with any self-help routine, the key to being an awesome motherfucker lies in a 4-Step program. Read on to enlightenment.

Step 1: Force yourself to listen to terrible music

Music can tell you an awful lot about a person, which is exactly the reason why you shouldn’t list Kiss among your favourite bands. For some inexplicable reason, the most revered music is a selection of indecipherable bleeps, bloops ‘n’ bass referred to as ‘Dubstep’, and it is within your best interests to familiarise yourself with it and its culture.

Its appreciators are more often than not empty-headed, drug-addled sex fiends, but these are the empty-headed drug-addled sex fiends you need to impress if you want women to see you as a sickeningly cool socialite.

Key things to focus on are ‘the drop’ (the name given to the point in a Dubstep track where the first minute of nothingness is replaced by a crescendo of unbearable noise) and the use of violent imagery to explain said drop, e.g. “dude, this drop is filthier than Josef Fritzl’s basement!!!”

Step 2: Wear unorthodox clothes

Now before you go and dig out your meat hat and 20-inch platform heels, allow me to be more specific; only celebrities can get away with constructing an outfit made entirely out of beef without being admitted to a mental institution. That doesn’t mean you can’t spice up your wardrobe in your own way, though. You might think it unbecoming to wear a tweed suit jacket and a pair of worker boots that look like they were excavated from Normandy beach, but the only way you’re going to turn heads amongst the fashionable crowd these days is if you look like you’ve been asleep for the past 3 generations.

Grow a bit of facial fluff, wear an abundance of tacky jewellery and throw on a pair of prescription glasses with the lenses popped out. You’ll look utterly ridiculous, sure, but as you’re now only mixing with the cool kids who are wearing the exact same shit as you, who’s going to call you up on it?

Step 3: Be arrogant

They say the first two things a woman notices when you walk into a bar are your shoes and your posture; your shoes because they give her a sense of the kind of salary you’re earning, and your posture because it lets her know how confident you are. This whole confidence thing is a recurring theme when it comes to impressing women, and we’re often told that we shouldn’t confuse it with arrogance because that isn’t attractive at all. I beg to differ.

If we stare deep within ourselves and pull out some of those big ol’ repressed memories, about 25% of them involve us banging our head against the wall at school and wondering why the assholes always get the hottest girls. But you can’t blame them; you’d have been doing the same thing too if you were ‘confident’.

So how do you become one of them? Well you’re definitely going to need a heightened sense of self-worth – the moment you walk into a club you need to instantly assume that you are better than everyone else and project that to those around you, be it by bragging of your career exploits or practicing the kind of grin that makes a man want to punch out each and every one of your smug teeth. Whenever possible throw wads of cash at the bar staff, and greet every woman who passes you by with a firm slap on the ass. You also must remember to wear sunglasses at ALL TIMES, even if it’s so dark that you’ve spent the past thirty minutes grinding up against a chair that you’ve mistaken for a hot blonde. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

Step 4: Get a job that no one understands

If there’s one sentence that can simultaneously confuse and intrigue people it’s “I work in new media”. A broad collection of careers that encompasses everything from web series director to professional blogger, new media is to the 21st century what rock’n’roll was to the 70’s. Sort of. Kinda. Well not at all, really, but as no one outside of those who are enjoying a career in it seems to have any clue as to what it is, it really can be whatever you want it to be.

So what career path in new media should you take? Perhaps you could be some sort of YouTube celebrity, making a daily video of your life to a growing audience of subscribers, who will treat their fandom of you in the same way that ‘normal’ folk worship Lady Gaga et al. Or you could be a social entrepreneur, amassing thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends until you’ve become a celebrity of your own creation, despite having done nothing to warrant it. The beauty of new media is that your job can be ostensibly awesome, whilst in actuality being quite run-of-the-mill; it all depends on how you present it. “My job is to promote a healthier worldview to a weekly audience” is a lot more respectable sounding than “I rant at my webcam every Tuesday to a bunch of angsty 15 year-olds”.